Tuesday, October 21, 2008

WordChamp is a language-learning network that offers very valuable and free resources to practice English.

The first thing that attracts one’s attention is the Flashcards, which include different activities to brush up your vocabulary through several exercises of: pronunciation, reading, dictation, grammar and other linguistic skills.

It’s also possible to look for flashcards among the huge collection available, as well as creating your own with lists of vocabulary.

Another interesting resource offered by WordChamp is Absolute Recall. With this resource you can keep track of every new word that you learn. The way it works is that you listen to a word in English and then you write it in your own language. The system saves your correct and incorrect answers, stressing the words that you got wrong.

Last but not least (indeed, it’s my favourite tool from WordChamp) you have the Web Reader that allows you to translate selected Web pages and texts.

The outcome of using Web Reader in a Web page in English is not that you should see the whole website translated to your native language, but that you can point to any word whose meaning you don’t know. The word is then highlighted in yellow and the translation to your own native language is given, as well as the option of listening to the pronunciation (in English and your native language). In the image below you can see an example of this from the New York Times Web page:

Note 2: WordChamp offers other interesting resources as a means to learn English. There is a section named Course Management, which is focused on English teachers and this allows them to create online classes for their students. These resources are not free of charge and for this reason they haven’t been mentioned before. However, we bring them to your attention now because someone may find them useful.